How to Clear Print Queue in Windows 10

So your Mom’s on the computer upstairs and she is doing something for your Dad’s job because your Dad can’t type and for some reason, she can’t get the printer working. So the next thing she does is press the print button five, six, seven times and counting but nothing is happening.

She then calls you upstairs to try to identify the problem. You click on the print button once, twice, three times, and then you realize what the problem is: she doesn’t have the cable connected. You shake your head at her before realizing you have a pretty big problem on your hands.

Now you’ve got a really long print queue happening and if you don’t cancel you are in lots of trouble and about to waste a lot of ink and paper—plus the time it’s going to take to print.

Don’t worry; there is a way out of this problem. All you need to do is know how to clear the print queue in Windows 10 and then it won’t print the things you asked for it to print by accident.

Clearing the print queue in Windows 10 operating systems

1. Click on the Start menu > Settings icon from the left side pane that Windows 10 offers.

2. Click on the “Devices” button from the Windows settings screen.

3. Click on the “Printers and Scanners” option from the left side pane.

4. You can then see the printer that you have connected to the computer appearing in the right side pane under where it says “Printers and Scanners.”

6. Here is where you will see the printing that is queued. Ours is currently empty because we don’t have anything in the queue.

7. All you need to do when you do see something there is right-click on the name of the file that is in the print queue and then click on the option to cancel it.

Whatever was in the print queue in your Windows 10 operating system will now be canceled, and the printing will not continue from the point of the cancellation. There is no way to start it up again unless you go back to what you wanted to print and select the option to print it again.

It’s worth noting that there are several ways you can stop a document from printing in Windows 10 and the guide above is just one of the ways by using the built-in Windows 10 settings. It’s the way that we think is the easiest but there is nothing wrong with doing one of the other ways either. The second best alternative is probably opening up the “Devices and Printers” app directly from the Search Windows box attached to the taskbar next to the Start menu. Once you open up the Device and Printers, you will see a picture of the printer that you have connected to the computer. You can right-click on the printer icon and then select the “See What’s Printing” option from the menu. Inside you can right-click again to stop the computer from printing anything that is in the queue.

That is everything you need to know about clearing the print queues when running on a version of the Windows 10 operating systems. There have been a couple of Windows 10 updates, including the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, that should all still have the same method as the guide above demonstrates without there being any changes that you need to know about for it to work.